What I Learned About Monetization by Launching a Lit Mag

"The presence of love does not eradicate the reality of labor."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

---

If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the grind of reading lit mags, scouring journals for work that resonates with yours, researching editors and editorial priorities, checking their reading periods, if they accept simultaneous submissions, and reformatting your drafts to match their specifications. And then, the final step in Submittable: you pay the reading fee. For me, this last step feels disheartening. Like, wow—I literally have to pay someone to read my work? I can’t even give my essays away?

But then I helped start a lit mag.

Sneaker wave magazine—named for the disproportionately large waves that slurp up the beach in the Pacific Northwest, where my co-editors and I met through the Pacific University MFA program—provides an online home for compelling nonfiction storytelling. We publish one phenomenal, well-written, true story every Sunday.

Sneaker wave is a passion project. But what does that mean for the way we structure this undertaking? What consequences will our early structural decisions have for sneaker wave’s long-term viability? And how do we fund this?

Right from the get-go, we knew certain things we wanted to prioritize. All nonfiction, all the time. We agreed that we want all the essays on sneaker wave to be available without a paywall. We also agreed that we want to pay our writers.

So the question becomes: where will the money come from? We set up the journal using Substack, which is designed to allow writers to establish paid newsletters. But we don’t want a paywall, so all donations would be totally volitional, rooted in goodwill. If no one decides to donate because they can read all of our publications for free, do we cover our expenses—compensation, legal fees and filing, registration for AWP—out of pocket? Since we’re entirely online, we don’t have to worry about printing or mailing costs, but we are determined to pay our writers, and ideally, eventually, ourselves. It’s a passion project, but none of us have the kind of expendable wealth that would allow sneaker wave to be a vanity project.

Different Lit Mag Business Models

Earlier this year, Lit Mag News hosted a roundtable on the topic of why lit mags close–and how to identify those that (hopefully) won’t. Benjamin Davis of Chill Subs (my favorite lit mag database), Erik Klass of SubmitIt (the world’s first full-service submissions company), and Lauren Hohle (current editor of Conjunctions, formerly with The Gettysburg Review) discussed the different business models that lit mags employ. They identified three primary options: (1) to depend on outside institutional funding, such as from a university; (2) to depend on outside personal funding, like from a mega-donor, trust, or family fund; or (3) to assemble a funding base from the people you serve by building out sustainable revenue streams, offering goods and services people are willing to pay for. While our team at sneaker wave discussed our options, I examined each of these models in depth.

Lit Mag Business Models: Outside Institutional Support, Like a University

Two positive examples are Lunch Ticket, an online magazine run by the Antioch University MFA program, and Qu, out of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA.

A less positive example would be what happened with The Gettysburg Review in October 2023. As with all the fiascos I’ll be referencing in the following bullet points, Becky covered the unfolding events on Lit Mag News, screenshotting tweets and aggregating reactions from around the lit mag-osphere. After 35 years of publication, the editors of Gettysburg Review were called into the office of the Gettysburg College President, who informed them that their magazine was being shut down, without any room for further discussion.

Depending entirely on a large institution amplifies the possibility that the funding entity isn’t fully aware of what they’re funding, the true value of lit mags (and who accrues that value: readers, writers, students, interns, society at large), and the loss that would come from shutting a lit mag down. Since institutions (universities in particular) often fund their magazines from a more generalized financial account, university magazines can sometimes become untethered from market pressures that would require them to stay in touch with their readership. For this reason, some university magazines and presses fail to promote what they publish, which is unfortunate for readers, writers, and presses alike.

Lit Mag Business Models: Outside non-institutional funding, such as from a mega-donor, trust, or family fund

This is a centuries-long model for funding the arts: the patron model, going all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. Patronage has provided the ultra-wealthy with a form of money- or reputation-laundering at least since the Renaissance. We still see this today, as with the protests directed at Whitney Museum board member and tear-gas profiteer Warren Kanders surrounding the 2019 Whitney Biennial, or the uproar over the Smithsonian Gallery named for the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma.

Where this model begins to make me uneasy is when the donor expects their monetary influence to translate into artistic or editorial influence. Does a mega-donor receive any say in what’s published, what visual art is put on view, or, say, if the newspaper they own endorses a presidential candidate?

My personal favorite fiasco of this flavor is the Catapult-Elizabeth Koch scandal from early 2023 (which, like the sudden closure of the Gettysburg Review, Becky covered extensively in Lit Mag News). To recap: A few months before the Gettysburg Review closure, the literary scene witnessed the sudden, unexplained closure of Catapult. (To be clear, Catapult did not shutter their presses, Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull.) The online magazine ceased publication, in-progress classes were cancelled, and teachers learned about their sudden unemployment not from Catapult themselves but via a tweet posted by Publisher’s Weekly.

Around the same time, billionaire funder Elizabeth Koch went public with a new venture that exists to promote her idea of “the perception box: an invisible mental box each of us lives inside that colors and shapes everything we experience.” One possible (and admittedly jaded) interpretation of these events is that Elizabeth Koch discovered subjectivity and developed an entire nonprofit to promote it, effectively defunding the other organization she had co-founded in order to do so. This lit mag horror story illustrates the necessity of diversified funding sources, because if a large portion of your money comes from one impulsive rich person, and they decide to take that money elsewhere, all of a sudden, Publisher’s Weekly is tweeting that you’re out of a job.

Lit Mag Business Models: assemble diversified funding by offering valuable goods and services to the community they serve: essentially, develop a product people actually want and are willing to pay for

The Chestnut Review does a great job of this with their paid editorial feedback options, and Cleaver offers recordings of classes you can purchase through their Submittable page. Many magazines offer contests with a large cash prize. These contests cost more to enter, but theoretically, the winners receive commensurate glory, as they paste that “Winner of Journal Name’s Prize” into their CV. The Rumpus, which has been publishing online since 2009, just launched a brand-new prize: $20 to enter and $1,000 if you win.

Of course, as with all the above models, there’s a predatory way to do this. At an Electric Literature salon in 2023 featuring editors from One Story, ZYZZYVA, the Offing, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Electric Lit, M.M. Carrigan of TBQ (one of my dream publications) announced that TBQ will never charge reading fees and that price-gouging people to have their work considered is “literary grift.” And in certain cases that’s definitely true. By now we probably all know about Narrative, a magazine best known for their exploitatively high submission fee ($26 for a regular submission, which is on par with a full year’s subscription for many magazines), allegations that the editors rigged a contest back in 2008, and many other questionable practices. I agree with Carrigan and others: Narrative is literary grift.

Some fiscal transparency

But then I close the inflammatory Reddit threads and look back at my desk, awash in scratch paper covered with calculations. Literary magazines often seem to operate from within an opaque black box. But I can at least bring some transparency to what the initial financials look like for sneaker wave.

We want to set ourselves up for sustainability in the long term, which means setting up processes, protocols, and technology that will allow us to scale as we grow. We wanted to look legit when we applied for incorporation with the government, and we wanted to keep all of our magazine communications separate from our personal stuff, so we set up Google workspace for personalized emails at a custom domain ($24/month, plus domain registration at $20 for 24 months, plus a $50 fee to link it to our Substack).

The governmental filing fees ordinarily cost $600, but we have annual gross receipts under $50,000–well under $50,000–so we can file via the IRS EZ form, which only costs $275. We want the stamp of approval from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) and our annual dues will cost $125. CLMP offers a member deal for Submittable, which will allow us to cap submissions and comes with an already-integrated way to charge a reading fee, but Submittable–like everything else I’ve mentioned–costs money.

The central math problem is how many submissions we think we can read x reading fee = income, - expenses for Submittable / number of writers we hope to publish = what we can pay our writers. (It feels like a Mastercard commercial. “Managing an incredible magazine and publishing great work from great writers? Priceless.”) But with that math problem, we don’t have any money set aside for ourselves: for all the hours each week we’re spending reading drafts, sending comments to writers, adjusting grammar, inviting greater specificity in the details, combing through previews for typos, formatting newsletters, designing graphics, promoting on social media, and setting up accounts to make ourselves legit (X or Bluesky? We went with Bluesky, after four weeks of X amounted to fewer than five followers). The panicked hours that my fellow editor Angela and I spent on the phone when we realized we’d linked our Substack to our custom domain backward, and suddenly I couldn’t access the Substack dashboard to reverse it (we sorted it out).

While we considered setting up an LLC, we eventually decided to incorporate as a nonprofit, so that we can apply for grants and solicit donations. So we’ve spent hours registering as a nonprofit, researching business licenses, opening bank accounts and obtaining EIN numbers from the IRS. I’m dusting off my old Google Grants for Nonprofit skills, rolling up my sleeves and trying to remind myself how ad-keywords work.

Art work is work

We want to run a really great magazine. We intend to publish phenomenal writing and to host a platform where our stories are widely read, by other writers and non-writers alike. And so far, we have! We’re publishing great work: stories about fatherhood, motherhood, girl scout camp, alien invasions, curb stompings, war, politics, awkward girls with bowl cuts. We’ve published essays about death, miscarriage, kung fu, and terrible dates. Every single week we are so proud of the work we’re making available in the world. Which is why we need a business model that allows us to pay ourselves.

We have this weird idea in our society that if you love doing something, you shouldn’t even want to get paid for it – that the involvement of money sullies the pursuit, that the purity of your passion is tainted by the invocation of capital. It’s that old adage (misattributed to Mark Twain and Confucius, actual source unknown): “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Which is absolutely false! The presence of love does not eradicate the reality of labor. That’s an incredibly romantic idea that mostly allows people with capital to manipulate and avoid paying people with passion. The long-term effect of this kind of framing leads to a world where people avoid the kinds of work they love, because (as anyone who’s worked in the nonprofit sector knows) your devotion can and will be used against you.

One of the many reminders hanging above my desk is a palm-sized rainbow banner that reads, “Art work is work.”

Thinking about monetization makes me feel greasy, but it’s necessary. This level of labor is unsustainable without compensation. Monetization is a way of protecting ourselves from burnout and therefore a way of ensuring the longevity of our publication: making good on our promise to provide an online home for compelling nonfiction storytelling.

We plan to be like public radio: anyone can access our content and full archive for free, and every so often we’ll ask our audience for money. As a charitable organization, our first circle of beneficiaries is writers themselves: we want to provide a great platform, and we want to provide each writer with an editing experience that helps present their story in the best possible light.

How do we add value?

I grew up in Colorado, which is dappled with towns founded in the Gold Rush of the 1800s. During school field trips to old mines, I learned that, while gold miners did occasionally strike it rich, the people who reliably made money were the folks who set up general stores and sold goods and services to the prospectors.

What’s our unique value proposal in a heavily saturated market? We quickly discovered that our team emphasizes and provides strong editing. Every writer accepted to sneaker wave works with at least two different editors from our masthead to do a developmental edit and a polishing copyedit on their piece. We work with the writer to ensure that their story is presented in the best possible light, with proper grammar, sensory detail and specificity, prose that reinforces the narrative, and striking sonic effect. As Mike Magnuson, our Editor-in-Chief, has been telling me for years: “Ya gotta have good earballs.”

In a sector where sometimes work is accepted and published without even a follow-up edit, we hope that writers are drawn to sneaker wave because of the intense care we put into their work.

The editing that we provide is a service, a way of contributing to a high-quality literary landscape, and a sort of “leave every place better than you found it” mentality. However, extensive editing requires a lot of time. Editing ensures the quality of our magazine, but it’s also what several of us do for work professionally. In order to be an effective freelancer of any kind, you must develop a practical understanding of what your time and skills are worth.

So when we open for submissions after AWP, we will be charging a reading fee. If writers would like additional feedback on their submitted work, we’ll offer tiered, higher cost options that allow for an editor’s overall response to their submission, or an extensive developmental edit. This is essentially a Business-to-Business (B2B) model, where writers pay us to help them improve their writing and make it more publishable. The subscriptions that we get through Substack are Business-to-Consumer (B2C), as regular readers pay us for making great storytelling accessible.

How do we advocate for a world where writing is valued?

Ultimately, launching a lit mag has forced me to think about how I contribute to the literary landscape, in terms of both content and capital. I’m a paying subscriber to Lit Mag News because I find so much value in the information that Becky aggregates and shares. This process prompted me to finally upgrade my membership at Chill Subs, which I’d been meaning to do for months.

What small presses do I follow and which books can I pre-order from them this season? How am I investing, monetarily, in the literary world I love? How am I advocating for people–writers, editors, and artists at large–to be paid for their work? And how are you?

---